On Sunday night, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced the cabinet and executive of the seventh administration, comprising of members of nine of the ten parties that form part of the recently established government of national unity (GNU).
The executive is comprises 32 ministers, 20 of them members of the ANC. The ANC also has 33 of the 43 deputy ministries. The DA, the second biggest party in the GNU, has six ministers and an equal number of deputy ministers.
The IFP, with two ministers, also has an equal number of deputy ministers. The Patriotic Alliance, Freedom Front Plus, Pan Africanist Congress of Azania and Good have one minister each.
The UDM and Al Jama-ah have one deputy minister each. There is no question that the executive is bloated – a problem that has been intensifying with each administration. This is concerning for many reasons, not least because of the amount of taxpayers’ money that is used to sustain the executive. Furthermore, evidence in SA and other global contexts indicates that bloated cabinets and executives are generally inefficient.
While I have my misgivings about some of the executive appointees, I also have guarded optimism about some of them. One of these is the DA’s Siviwe Gwarube, the new minister of basic education. Gwarube succeeds the ANC’s Angie Motshekga, who has been moved to the ministry of defence and military veterans. Before her new role, Gwarube, who has been a member of the National Assembly since 2019, was the chief whip of the official opposition. She has also served as the shadow minister of health and the national spokesperson of the DA.
A graduate of Rhodes University, Gwarube holds a bachelor’s degree in law, politics and philosophy. I hold no brief for the DA and I am a critic of its liberal ideological posture. While the DA’s policies on higher education in particular leave much to be desired for much-needed transformation and decolonisation, the party’s commitment to certain aspects of basic education matter.
One such aspect is the national minimum norms and standards for school infrastructure, which, along with civil society organisations such as Equal Education and Section27, the party has fought hard to have implemented.
The norms and standards are aimed at the creation of an equitable and enabling physical teaching and learning environment. It is an outline of the basic infrastructure that must exist in state schools in terms of architectural and planning norms.
Over the last 14 years after the adoption of these norms, some progress has been made to improve infrastructure in schools. However, there have also been significant failures, particularly in predominantly rural provinces such as the Eastern Cape, Limpopo, Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal.
The implications of these failures are evident in the uneven standards of teaching and learning between these provinces and industrial provinces such as Gauteng and the Western Cape. This unevenness is a function of historical imbalances and the persistence of poor infrastructure. In many schools, even basic sanitation infrastructure does not exist, resulting in horrific cases of learners falling into pit-latrines.
I am hopeful that under the guidance of Gwarube, norms and standards will be fully implemented. It’s also helpful that the new minister of public works and infrastructure, which is a critical partner in the development of public infrastructure including schools, is from the DA.
This should make synchronisation of work between the two departments easier. I hope that every day when she enters her office, Gwarube will remember the children who have died in pit-latrines in schools across the country. For Michael Komape, Lumka Mketwa, Unecebo Mboteni, Viwe Jali and others, the norms and standards must be implemented.
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